Gold/Silver Ratio, etc

Since March 7, 2011, the ratio between the prices of gold and silver has been below 41 every trading day but for three days. The ratio at current prices is at the lowest it's been all year (38.48). This means it takes a little less than 39 ounces of silver to purchase an ounce of gold.

On June 7, 2010, nine months ago, the ratio was 70. In other words, if you'd traded 2 ounces of gold then, it would have bought 140 ounces of silver. Today, you could trade that silver back into roughly 3.5 ounces of gold, a 75% gain in only 9 months. Zero leverage in two investments considered to be sterile, producing a true 75% return... after all, you started with only 2 1-ounce coins... now, you have 3 1-ounce coins and a half-ounce coin.

Wait A Minute... I Thought We Were All Supposed To Be Dead By Now

EPA's radiation monitoring is online here.

Private radiation monitoring network here.

Webcam feed of a Geiger counter in Los Angeles here.

Webcam feed of a Geiger counter in Tokyo here.

Weather and radiation levels in Tokyo here.

Instead of blowing all that money and energy on freaking out over the "fallout" that was going to kill us all, maybe we should have been more focused on praying for the millions of Japanese affected by the massive earthquake, the subsequent massive tsunami, the loss of 20% of the nation's power generation during winter, and the economic meltdown that's currently taking place in Japan. Black Swan event, indeed.

An Actual Expert On the Subject

Turn off the television and radio, ignore the sky-is-falling blog posts and frantic ButtFace FaceBook status updates. Then head over to the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler and read LC Jackboot's take on the Fukushima Daiichi power plant problems. Run, don't walk. Seriously, read it all, but be forewarned that Jackboot is ex-Navy, so the language is a little rough in a couple spots.

Geiger Counter in Tokyo

The video stream of the Geiger counter I posted yesterday is offline now. Of course, that causes tons of people to freak out and assume that something horrific has happened. In any case, here's another site with readings taken every 10 minutes and graphed out over what appears to be about 36 hours. Here's a snapshot of the graph:

As you can see, Tokyo is still not receiving significant amount of radiation. It sounds like the bulk of the radiation that's being reported as leaking from the Fukushima reactor is from noble gases, with extremely short half-lives. In other words, unless you're in the immediate vicinity of the reactor and stay there for hours, the radiation isn't going to significantly affect you. That's the current status; the situation is still developing, but the more I read, the more (cautiously) optimistic I am.

UPDATE (3/16/2011 12:45pm ADT): The live video stream of the Geiger counter in Tokyo is back online, and the counter is currently reading around 23 CPM.

More Radiation In Denver Than Tokyo

Here's a live feed of a Geiger counter in Tokyo. Tokyo is 142 miles from the Fukushima power plant.

Compare that to the National Radiation Map. Currently, there is nearly twice as much radioactivity (57 CPM vs 28 CPM) being registered in Denver than there is in Tokyo.

Per the latter web site, 130 CPM is an unusually high count.

Kind of puts things in perspective.

Synchronicity... again...

Several years ago, we made the decision to begin, bit by bit, to prep a bit. We're hardly what you'd call "preppers" but we realized after 9/11 that Alaska is in a pretty precarious spot if anything big were ever to happen. So, we decided that, as our first order of business, we should acquire at least enough MREs to feed the family for a week in an emergency. I did a bit of research and finally settled on ordering a couple cases of Wornick Eversafe MREs from Long Life Food Depot. That was late August of 2005. I placed the order, but not before Hurricane Katrina hit. My order took a couple months to be fulfilled.

Oh Noze! We're All Gonna Die!

Yeah, that's the basic content of half the emails and ButtFace FaceBook posts from my reactionary friends and family (the ones referred to in my last post as pessimistic suckers) regarding the Japanese reactors.

In the interest of spreading more level-headed information (as opposed to the ignorant crap at Prison Planet*), here is the email message I composed to some of my wild-eyed family members today:

I'd recommend taking anything on Prison Planet with a grain of salt. They tend toward the sensational and are notorious for playing fast and loose with the facts. Just to put this all into perspective, here is a trio of informational sites, from folks that know something about nuclear power (which the Prison Planet guy clearly does not) and are closely monitoring the situation: